Truth Is Scarier

ENLARGE

Sean Gormley, Tessa Klein and Dan Butler
Carol Rosegg

By

Terry Teachout

May 23, 2013 6:17 p.m. ET

New York

Theater starts with storytelling, of which ghost stories are the most primal kind. This helps to explain the long-lasting appeal of
Conor McPherson's
"The Weir," whose successful 1999 Broadway run introduced New York playgoers to the most admired Irish playwright of his generation. "The Weir" consists of four ghost stories told by a quartet of drinkers who find themselves spending a stormy evening together at a rural Irish pub. On the surface, that's all there is to it, but scratch the surface and "The Weir" proves to be a profound meditation on the twin themes of loneliness and community, told so theatrically that you'll savor each peat-scented phrase. The trick is to get the details right, and the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival, staged with sure-footed simplicity by
Ciarán O'Reilly,
is totally believable. From the inch-thick brogues of the actors to the neon signs on the walls of the barroom set, it's as convincing as a deathbed confession.

Deceptive simplicity is the hallmark of "The Weir," which has just five characters, a bartender (Billy Carter), three regulars (
Dan Butler,
Sean Gormley
and
John Keating
) and an outsider, a young woman named Valerie (
Tessa Klein
) who has moved to the rural village where the play is set to find peace and quiet. Small-town life, of course, is never as quiet as it looks from the outside—Mr. McPherson hints at the daily vexations that arise from seeing the same small group of people day after day after day—but Valerie has brought her own inward turmoil with her, and no sooner do her new friends tell their elaborate stories of spooky doings than she ups the ante with a tale of terror that turns out to be both true and tragic.

"The Weir" is carefully structured to build up to Valerie's big scene, and Ms. Klein knows how to deliver the payoff. Even during the first part of the play, when she does little but react shyly to the other characters, your eye keeps flicking to her, and you won't be able to look anywhere else once she takes center stage. Her colleagues are all strong, but it's Ms. Klein, who made a tremendous impression on me five years ago playing opposite
Daniel J. Travanti
in "A Touch of the Poet," that you'll be thinking about the next day.

Mr. O'Reilly and the Irish Repertory Theatre are having a fabulous season. Their galvanizing revival of
Brian Friel's
"The Freedom of the City" set a high mark for excellence, but "The Weir," if possible, tops it.
Michael Gottlieb's
lighting is subtle to the utmost degree, and
Charlie Corcoran,
who designed the sets for both shows, has come up with a cozy pub so real-looking that you'd be tempted to belly up to the bar and order a Guinness if there were an intermission. I was surprised to see in the program that
Stephen Gabis
was credited as the show's dialect coach, not because there's anything at all wrong with the Irish accents of the actors but for the opposite reason: They're so right that you take them for granted.

The unfailingly consistent excellence of the Irish Rep is no less easy to take for granted. Don't make that mistake. I didn't see the Broadway premiere of "The Weir," but I can't imagine its having been even slightly better than this revival, which has the additional advantage of being presented in a theater so small that you'll feel as though you'd pulled up a stool and sat next to Ms. Klein and her colleagues to hear their eerie tales.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

ENLARGE

John Turturro
Stephanie Berger

The Master Builder

BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St.,

Brooklyn, N.Y. ($25-$90),

718-636-4100, closes June 9

John Turturro
is an actor so distinctive in style that he can easily swamp a play to which he isn't closely suited. While he couldn't have been better as the pathetically ludicrous Lopakhin of
Andrei Belgrader's
2011 Classic Stage Company revival of "The Cherry Orchard," the two men have fired wide of the target with
Henrik Ibsen's
"The Master Builder," in which Mr. Turturro plays an aging architect whose comfortable life is disrupted by a surprise visit from a pretty nymphet (
Wrenn Schmidt
) with mayhem on her mind. The seven members of the cast are all highly accomplished performers, but no two of them seem to be acting in the same show, and Ibsen's uneasy but thought-provoking mixture of naturalism and symbolism (who is that girl, anyway?) has been transformed by Mr. Belgrader into a cartoonish stage portrayal of a midlife crisis, with Mr. Turturro stomping all over the stage in the grandiose manner of a Great 19th-Century Actor and Ms. Schmidt squirming around like Lolita in heat. Whatever Ibsen really thought "The Master Builder" was about—and that's a hard question to answer—it surely wasn't this.

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